A Berkeley Copwatch + WITNESS Initiative

As Copwatch matured, it was clear that we needed to raise the standard of information that we gathered and our ability to use it in support of various policy campaigns. We needed to be able to find the footage and aggregate incidents in order to demonstrate patterns of abuse. In addition, we were moving away from the idea that we could shame or change a police department by finding one high profile, outrageous incident that would somehow cause the transformation of the department. We realized that people in our city also suffered from the less dramatic, but still impactful daily abuses such as illegal searches, punitive destruction of property, racial profiling, illegal towing, as well as instances of unnecessary force and more. These patterns of enforcement required that we be able to substantiate our concerns with aggregated footage/data and be able to gather all of this information together in an organized and comprehensive way, sometimes quickly.